On Credible Female Characters

Over at The New Statesman, Belinda Parmar complains about a game her son plays–Skylanders–in which there are no credible female characters:

The sky-lands are a man’s world, and this is a game in which a mostly male cast of fantasy heroes have to smash and bash their way through a mostly male cast of fantasy baddies. There’s almost no problem that cannot be overcome by slashing or shooting.

There are characters who are explicitly female such as Ningini. You can tell they are female because they are narrower-waisted with disproportionately large breasts and they grunt in a slightly higher-pitched tone than their male counterparts. These physical characteristics aside, they are functionally identical to the male characters – that is to say they obliterate and plunder in a broadly similar way.

For reasons of cost or lack of imagination – the female characters are merely alternative “models” – animated graphics that are loaded each time the player selects another character. The end result is a sort of PC pretence that gender differences don’t exist, since in this game everybody does exactly the same job in exactly the same way.

I grow tired–as I sense Parmar does–of the perceived need of game developers, editors, and producers to include an equal number of male and female characters in every game, book, or film. Our culture is obsessed with tallying, but parity of characters or writers does not make a game, book or magazine more womanly or better. On that score, initiatives like The VIDA Count are almost entirely misguided.

But here’s the deal: The “PC pretence” that Parmar identifies in Skylanders–where “gender differences don’t exist”–is not so much pretense as it is a faithful application of a feminism that regularly disregards such biological differences. As Parmar notes, that disregard is neither true nor interesting.

I once had a staunchly feminist English professor who had enrolled her daughter in a gender neutral preschool. There were no gendered toys, only things likes blocks and sticks. When she went to pick up her daughter, she was shocked to see that the girls were walking around the room cradling the blocks. The boys were throwing them.

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17 Responses to On Credible Female Characters

I’m honestly curious to know how a “credible” female character would play out in a video game? Would she be doing the weekly shopping at the grocery store? At home taking care of the kids? Folding her 5th load of laundry? Emotionally supporting a girlfriend on the phone?

Let’s be honest: most of the male characters in video games aren’t very credible, either. This is not to say my husband couldn’t use a gun to kill an intruder for the sake of our family (so could I, for that matter). But his everyday behavior is more along the lines of working, doing chores around the house, running the kids to various activities, perhaps indulging in a hobby.

The women in video games are stacked hotties wielding sleek weapons because that is perceived as sexy. A good perecentage of video game players are young males, so it makes sense financially. Who wants to watch a video game including a plump mother making a snack for her kids or an out-of-shape dad taking out the garbage?

Video games are fantasies. I don’t know anybody whose fantasies include regular people doing regular things. The audience wants sexy, so the video game makers give it to them. Most men love the idea of a hot chick wielding physical power (talk about a challenge!), and power in a video game is all about your weapons. The adrenaline rush keeps people going back for more.

The only gender differences most young males want to see in a video game are big breasts, shapely buttocks, and a pretty face. The consumers drive the creators, editors, and producers. Give them what they want, and they will continue to pay for it. Give them real-life, and they will go find another game-maker.

The idea that feminism is blind to gender is ridiculous. Feminism insists, instead, that gender can not be reliably related to sex. So some girls will cradle blocks and some will throw them. Some boys will cradle blocks and some will throw them.

(Our culture is obsessed with tallying, but parity of characters or writers does not make a game, book or magazine more womanly or better. On that score, initiatives like The VIDA Count are almost entirely misguided.)

This is in direct contradiction to the point you are trying to make. If gender and sex are as firmly linked as you claim, then how could the VIDA count not important? If two distinct voices exist, why would the The Paris Review and New York Times Book Review not be both better and more womanly if those voices were included? Or is your argument that throwing is inherently more valuable than cradling?

I’m honestly curious to know how a “credible” female character would play out in a video game? Would she be doing the weekly shopping at the grocery store? At home taking care of the kids? Folding her 5th load of laundry? Emotionally supporting a girlfriend on the phone?

Right?

Let’s be honest: most of the male characters in video games aren’t very credible, either.

Right???

I find the argument that Mattix is making here very, very annoying.

First of all, it always leaves implicit what female and male characters should be doing. What are the proper gender roles?

When I was a little boy, I really enjoyed girls cartoons, because those cartoons featured emotions and problem solving that went beyond blowing things up with laser guns.

I didn’t like fighting or breaking things, and I was a nervous little fellow who liked things orderly and calm.

I am god-damned sick and tired of being told that I wasn’t a real boy, that my actual real bloody life as a boy is not credible or worth thinking about, that boys like me should be swept under the rug and ignored because we aren’t as truly male as the boys throwing blocks at each other.

I was tired of it 25 years ago, when kids were making fun of me for liking girl things, and I’m still tired of it today.

“The idea that feminism is blind to gender is ridiculous. Feminism insists, instead, that gender can not be reliably related to sex. So some girls will cradle blocks and some will throw them. Some boys will cradle blocks and some will throw them.”

That seems a bit disingenuous. Yes, some boys will cradle blocks and some girls will thrown them, but most girls will cradle blocks and most boys will throw them. “Some” is doing a lot of sub rosa work here.

In any event, feminism is not a monolith, and many feminists, and, indeed, what is usually perceived as the more radical wing actually does believe that there inherent, biological differences between the genders. And, I take it, that was the point of the feminist criticism of the video game, that the female characters were simply replicas of the male characters, but with secondary sexual body traits added. Otherwise, they were just like the boys, and that is unrealistic.

“If gender and sex are as firmly linked as you claim, then how could the VIDA count not important? If two distinct voices exist, why would The Paris Review and New York Times Book Review not be both better and more womanly if those voices were included? Or is your argument that throwing is inherently more valuable than cradling?”

Leaving aside the last bit of rhetorical flourish, I actually agree that publications do better when they, perhaps without explicit “tallying,” do provide multiple, or to use a word in disfavor in these precincts, “diverse,” POVs. I don’t actually think it as drastic as “two distinct voices,” but I do believe that gender, like race, class, center or periphery, life experience, religion or world view, etc, differences matter, and that the more POVs heard from, generally speaking, the better.

Of course, none of this makes much sense in the context of a video game designed for and marketed almost exclusively to heterosexual boys and young men. It makes about as much sense to complain about the lack of “credible” female characters here as to complain about their lack in Playboy, or in porn videos. Of course, one can still complain, from a feminist viewpoint, about objectification and impossible body standards and so on and so forth, in all of these medias, but, as poster ginger makes clear, the intended audience of the game in question has no interest in allowing the reality of real female (or indeed, male) persons intrude on their fantasy.

And, by the way, this is not an exclusively male phenomenon. Women too have fantasies, and have media that cater to them and their fantasies…soap operas, romance novels, rom coms, etc. And the male characters in such vehicles often bear no real resemblance to actual men either.

The complaint here is silly. Video games almost ubiquitously deal with violence for the obvious reason that modeling bullets is easy and modeling personalities is currently near impossible. What this person wants is a video game that either contains no women or is far beyond our current level of expertise. I have a feeling that just removing the women wouldn’t remove the complaining.

This is just splitting hairs. For all the talk of sex in media and it’s effects on girls and women they need to look a lot closer to home. Sex in film, porn, none of them are as insidious as Barbie. Nothing quite like giving girls an image that they can never achieve.

Stipulated: that there have been a few highly successful female warriors – Anne Bonny, Mary Read, Lila Litvak, Roza Shanina, etc. Stipulated further that such women are extremely unusual, almost to the point of aberrance, and that there are both cultural and biological reasons for this.

Even given this, is it not obvious that in a video game that’s about fighting and slashing, the female characters will be the Mary Reads and Roza Shaninas of the world, not the Eleanor Roosevelts or Marie Curies, no matter how much more typical of womanhood the latter two may be? The concept of the game demands this.

I think the comments are largely missing that there is a middle ground somewhere between “Space Marine with DDs, functions the same as the male with bulging muscles” and “Comforting her friend on the phone while making lunch for her kids.” That’s where credible female characters live, neither a stereotype nor a man with breasts. When female characters become merely men with breasts, adolescents are socialized to look for that in a partner and to consider any deviation from that male norm in a girlfriend’s behavior to be “annoying girl stuff” that the girl must then be shamed for. Why can’t she just behave exactly like a man? All the girls on TV and in World of Warcraft act like that, why can’t you? A true feminism is about breaking gender stereotypes, yes, but also about breaking the privilege assigned to the masculine and showing the value of the feminine in balance.

Although in RPGs this is largely done so as not to let aesthetic decisions effect later gameplay. To use World of Warcraft as an example, players may literally invest hours a day into developing a character to top level and then training skills and acquiring the equipment necessary to be competitive. While it is clearly absurd that a human female, portrayed as small lithe and big chested, can have the same strength and perform the same roles as a male MINOTAUR, it is done that way because otherwise players would revolt and quit when they got their female warrior all the way to top level after a great deal of time and effort only to discover that they had wasted their time because the only competive warriors are males.

To get an idea of what feminists are complaining about, read a few Patricia Highsmith books. She has no credible MALE characters — all her nominal men are really women in disguise. It’s really weird, but I guess that that sort of thing is an everyday experience for a woman.

“I think the comments are largely missing that there is a middle ground somewhere between “Space Marine with DDs, functions the same as the male with bulging muscles” and “Comforting her friend on the phone while making lunch for her kids.” That’s where credible female characters live, neither a stereotype nor a man with breasts. When female characters become merely men with breasts, adolescents are socialized to look for that in a partner and to consider any deviation from that male norm in a girlfriend’s behavior to be “annoying girl stuff” that the girl must then be shamed for. Why can’t she just behave exactly like a man? All the girls on TV and in World of Warcraft act like that, why can’t you? A true feminism is about breaking gender stereotypes, yes, but also about breaking the privilege assigned to the masculine and showing the value of the feminine in balance.”

You are the one who is “missing” something.

And that something is that most video games are NOT like TV shows or movies or books, in that the “characters” are not even rough approximations of human beings, of whatever gender. They are fantasy creations designed to appeal to their target audience. Thus, the men characters are super masculine sword fighters, while the woman are, unless they are, say, the evil queen or a witch, or an insignificant old character like an old villager, hot babes (princesses, “trophy” women of various types, warrior “Xena” like women, etc).

The “privilege” is about being the target audience for the game. The mainly hetero young men and adolescent boys who buy the games are simply not interested in “credible” characters, of either gender. That’s what “fantasy” is all about, in this context. A game in which the women characters were like the real women and girls in the life of the target audience would no more appeal to them than one in which the male characters were like them and their high school or college aged buddies. In the games, the male characters go on quests. They kill monsters and villains, and overcome wizards and warlords. The female characters are, again, either “rewards” or co questers. Nobody, neither the male or female characters, do things like have heart to heart talks about feelings, but neither do they talk about basketball, or pop music, or school, or whatever adolescents talk about, female or male. Nobody takes care of kids. Nobody goes to work at Burger King, and so on.

Cliff:

Again, if this was a book, or a series of books, or the run of books generally, that we were talking about, your argument might be on point. But it isn’t when addressed to fantasy video games.

Young males (and a lot of older males, too) generally aren’t interested in that “middle ground.” Until they are,the game creators will keep giving them weapon-wielding babes with hot bodies.

I don’t play video games. I’m female, a 40’s something mom of six. But if I were going to create a video game character for myself, she’d be not only be beautiful, taut, and stacked, she’d be as fierce as they come. If you are going for fantasy, after all, why stop in the boring middle? I am going to reach for the stars!

In my real life, I’m your typical mid-40s mom of many, with an average job, spending her weekend getting caught up on mounds of laundry and chores. And providing emotional support to girlfriends when they need it. It’s a good life, and I have no complaints.